We’ve written before – and don’t mind writing again – that one of the truest joys of Kelly Thompson’s run of Captain Marvel has been in the coalescing of Carol’s supporting cast. Thompson does well to bolster relationships, highlighting the human over the superhuman. In Revenge of the Brood Part 1, she returns to some of Carol’s classic relationships with the X-Men – not just Rogue, who we’ve spent time with in this series before, but with the X-Men proper.
Since her ascendence to Captain, we’ve been seeing Carol almost exclusively as a solo character or Avenger, so it’s interesting to see her playing off another team, commanding a very specific set of powers and a very specific team synergy. It’s a team that she’s been a part of before; she was, after all, the X-Men’s first non-mutant almost-member. Like the introduction of Binary, this all harkens back to Carol’s first salvation by way of creator intervention by historic X-Men mastermind Chris Claremont back in the early ’80s.
None of that deep history has been made pertinent to Carol’s current status of Earth’s Mightiest Hero – her contemporary mythology is more firmly based on the Kree genetics that is her origin – but that might easily come from neglect of creators’ examination of those relationships in a modern context.
It isn’t the deep examination and exploration of the relationship that has excelled in the series, but the loving familiarity injected into each interaction between the characters. We love that Carol loves Jessica Drew to the point of having an emotional shorthand with her; we love that Carol is excited to see Jean. Even though the team Carol takes to space is made up of X-Men with whom she doesn’t have a lot of Classic X-Men history (Gambit, Kwannon, Laura, Polaris), Thompson makes us feel as if the characters have a long, overlapping real life going on off-panel. A world where heroes, by the nature of their crisis-responding jobs, interact with regularity.
Marvel Comics
The book’s classic menace – a Brood made into classic unending cannon fodder – becomes a sort of static field against which these relationships and narratives are thrown; ever-present in unending waves, their threat is in their ability to overwhelm. They are made, by different turns of art teams, knobby and bulky, gruesomely organic (by penciler Sergio Davila and ink-team Sean Parsons and Elisabetta D’amico) and as sleek engines of destruction (much like their original Xenomorph inspiration) by Javier Pina.
The first interpretation highlights the individual creatures as bodily, one-on-one threats — all wriggling danger and teeth — while the second illustrates the insidious, single-minded swarm, glittering and hard-shelled. The dual interpretations show how rich of a monstrous force the Brood can be when handled with both attention and affection. Either neglected or kept in reserve, they have most recently been made intergalactic political pawns rather than the disturbing threat they can be.
As we approach the conclusion of this era of Carol Danvers, it’s hard to imagine a more decisive and pointed concluding arc than taking her all the way back to the point in her history when she received the most revolutionary overhaul of her long, incredible story…up to the point she became Captain Marvel. Revenge of the Brood Part 1 distills Kelly Thompson’s ear for the lovingly familiar and the far-flung weirdness of Claremont’s X-Men, making this essential Carol reading.
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